PROPER 14C2
AUGUST 10, 2025
FR. JERRY THOMPSON
ST. JAMES’ CHURCH, FREMONT, NE
When people are preparing for ordination, they have to go through what’s called “CPE.”
That stands for “Clinical Pastoral Education.” Many people would say one has to endure it.
The idea is that you serve in some setting – it’s most often a hospital – and you’re part of a group that together reflects on everyone’s experiences. You take turns talking about your experiences through verbatims - that is, word for word reporting of your exchanges with someone you’re serving. Then you get to hear what your colleagues think about your exchanges, how you handled them, and your relative mental and spiritual health
as you were walking through them.
As you might imagine, it’s a whole lot of fun! One of those really great growing experiences we all look forward to!
Depending on what group you’re in, you might also do some other things, too. One of the tools we explored in my CPE program was a spiritual gifts inventory. If I’m remembering correctly, some of you here at St. James have done something similar.
You take a kind of test,and then, according to how you’ve answered the questions,
you’re told what particular gifts for ministry God has given you.
I found myself surprised, those many, many moons ago, I was surprised to be told that, according to my own self-reporting, I had the gift of faith. But as I’ve lived through the next 40 years since then, I’ve come to understand how true that is, and how my faith contributes to my life inside and outside ordained ministry.
According to the Letter to the Hebrews, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, “the conviction of things not seen.”
How many of us have ever been in love? Being in love is a feeling that we don’t see,
but it is very real, isn’t it?
That sense of wanting to be with another person, of wanting to be intimately involved in every aspect of their lives, and have them involved in yours, that desire to be connected at the deepest level.
We should note that being in love is not the same as loving. To love is a verb, an action, a choice; it’s not a feeling, it’s not a desire.
Hopefully when we are “in love,” we also choose to love. For a couple in love with each other, that feeling might continue, even if it changes with time and takes on different dimensions. But they must also choose to love however the feeling changes with time.
Love is a choice, a choice that we make to act sacrificially toward another person, to put the other person first, to put them before ourselves. That’s why we can speak of loving God and also loving our neighbor – the two great commands of God given first to Moses and then affirmed by Jesus. We love God and neighbor by putting them before ourselves.
Faith is a lot like love in this regard. Sure, God might have given me and others the gift of faith – of trusting in realities we cannot see - but faith is only real if we act it out in our lives, if we express with our choices the deep conviction we have about the dimension of life that we cannot see – that we do not see with our eyes, and yet that we experience all the time, whether or not we’re aware of it: the acting of God toward us in love.
Not just in the incarnation of Jesus; not just in his preaching and teaching and healing
as he reveals the love of the Father toward us; not just at the cross, and not just at the resurrection.
But his love right now, today, even as I speak these words, love toward us moving in the life of our world and moving in our individual lives in a redeeming way – and asking us,
continually calling us, to join him in loving the world by the choices we make. I grant you that sometimes it’s hard to see God loving us. The failure of so many – well, the failure of all of us – to do likewise with each other, to love God and neighbor, it makes it that much harder to see God loving us.
But faith tells us that God is nonetheless loving us, whether or not we perceive it. Faith is the conviction of things not seen, the conviction that they are true even though we fail to see them, even though they cannot be proven; even though we cannot show others that they are true.
All we can do is give witness by our words and actions – words and actions that say,
“we trust in what we cannot see. “we trust in the loving God who is calling us to be just as loving, “and thereby know the kingdom of God among us.”
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews also tells us that faith is the assurance of things hoped for. Things hoped for by their very nature have not yet taken place; they are things that will take place in the future, outside the parameters of the lives we now know.
For Christians, that’s the coming of the kingdom, the reign of God over all people and all things, a reality we live far from at the moment, that time when justice and mercy toward all reigns.
The inbreaking of the kingdom is a bit different than what we cannot see – simply because we all experience the kingdom breaking into our lives whether or not we recognize it as the kingdom of God, whether or not we know it as heaven breaking into our earthly reality. Those moments when we love with no benefit to ourselves and often at cost to ourselves, and we recognize that something special is happening, something that transcends life as usual.
We might experience something that we know as quite real and yet, which we might not talk about, a moment in which the kingdom breaks through. We might not talk about it out of fear of being perceived as, in the words of someone at formation one evening, as being perceived as a bit “wackadoodle!”
Personally, I love that word! Wackadoodle! We choose not to talk about those times
because they’re not realities we can observe or repeat – and we all have been reared with that necessity as part of our DNA, that something must be observable and repeatable to be considered real. And that attitude is not just since the initiation of the scientific world view because the same tensions are very much present in scripture.
Scripture, just like today, is comprised of the stories of people who act on trust in what cannot be seen, trust in God; and it’s comprised of stories of people who act on trust in other things, other people, other realities, some of which can be seen and some of which cannot, for example, unfaithful leaders, wealth and worldly power. The Letter to the Hebrews holds up our ancestor Abraham as one of those who lived with trust in what could not be seen. And he does so even when it’s in contradiction to what he could see – for example, his barren wife and the aging of both of them written on their faces and in their bodies.
There’s a clause in the letter that’s easy to read over quickly and not appreciate as deeply as we need to appreciate it. We’re told that the fruit of Abraham’s faith comes
because he “considered him faithful who had promised.”
Abraham’s faith is ultimately rooted in the nature of God. God is faithful – and therefore Abraham could be faithful, too, faithful to God in return.
God is faithful. Faithful to his promises, faithful to his covenants, faithful, faithful, faithful.
And so, trusting that God IS faithful, knowing in our depths that God is faithful, we can be faithful to God in return.
We can make that all important choice to trust. We can love our faithful God, and we can love our neighbor whether or not they are faithful. Jesus knows this so deeply that he chooses to be faithful to us, even when we choose not to be faithful to him. That’s the story of his life, and the story of the cross; it’s the story we are called to be part of.
The Letter to the Hebrews goes on to say “all of those” – that is, Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob and all those other ancestors who acted faithfully – “All of those died in faith without having received the promises, “but from a distance they saw and greeted them.”
I can’t help but think of Moses, whose eyes look upon the promised land, but the Lord doesn’t permit Moses to enter it because Moses has disobeyed him. Moses dies and is buried before the people enter the promised land.
The end of the earthly life of Moses is a metaphor for all our lives. Like all people of faith, we see our heavenly home from a distance, as the Letter to the Hebrews says.
We know it – because we know the love of Jesus and we choose to be part of that love.
Those are the moments we know the fullness of the kingdom – even though we’re not yet living in that fulness, in that promised land. We nonetheless know it. We get a glimpse of it because we participate in it.
And those moments of breaking through help us to keep making choices of love and faith. They help us to be assured of where all this is leading to. What an incredible gift those moments are! What an incredible gift the kingdom is to all of us.
I imagine most of us are familiar with St. Mother Teresa. She served the poorest of the poor in India for decades, alongside her sisters in ministry. After she died, her journals were published. A number of people were astounded by the fact that she had a revelation of God’s love – an direct, radical experience of the breaking through of the kingdom – and then nothing for the next forty years! Except, of course, for her unending acts of love, chosen out of faith in the God of Jesus who had made himself known to her. And the kingdom continued to break through as she loved.
Her life is a metaphor for us all, just as is true about Moses. Whether or not we have direct mystical experience of the love of God, we need to act based on our trust in the God of Jesus. We need to choose love. We need to participate in the kingdom and incarnate it through our actions. We need to choose love – for our own good, and for the good of God’s world, for God’s entire creation. We need to help the kingdom break through by being part of it.
So, friends, be like Abraham. Choose to trust in God, as outlandish as God can sometimes be, asking us to trust in what we cannot see around us. And be like Moses. Choose to trust in where God is leading you, even though you aren’t likely to see it fully before you die. And be like Jesus. Choose to trust in your Father even when the going gets tough, and people around you are not making the choices they too are called to make. Trust - and love - to the very end. And be like Saint Mother Teresa. Love with your whole life, as her Lord and our Lord does, knowing in the depths of your soul that loving with your whole life is why you were born.
Amen.